


Breaking News on the Planet Zoon

by T Verano (t_verano)



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Bees - all the bees, Community: sentinel_thurs, M/M, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2010-08-31
Packaged: 2020-02-28 17:35:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18761170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_verano/pseuds/T%20Verano
Summary: Deus Ex Machina, apian-style





	Breaking News on the Planet Zoon

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sentinel Thursday prompt 337, "Pollen" 
> 
> janedavitt beta read this and I thank her immensely, for the beta (and catching a My Face Would've Been So Red moment) and also for helping me work on learning some things I want to learn. Which I still haven't really learned yet, at least not very well -- I bless your patience, Jane. I may never get where I'd like to get, but I hope to get closer, anyway.

"I don't want to know, do I." Jim looked at the Ziploc bag in his hand and sighed. He really did know better than to venture into the perilous depths of his own freezer before he was truly awake; God alone knew what he might come up with instead of the bag of coffee beans when he was fumbling around with his eyes still at half mast and his defenses down.

"It's bee pollen." Sandburg sounded abstracted and he didn't glance up from the book he was reading. Well, at least that meant there was only one new weird substance in the freezer requiring identification this morning. Jim hoped that it meant that.

_Bee pollen._ Of course it was bee pollen. Why wouldn't it be?

Even if Jim hadn't yet learned to be cautious when foraging in the freezer he _had_ learned not to ask what any new strange substance was for. Not that his caution mattered a damn; Sandburg would tell him anyway. Jim looked at the bag of yellow granules again with resignation. _Three, two, one_ —

"Good for energy and stamina," Blair said, sparing just enough attention from his book to snag his mug of weedy-smelling tea from the table, and to enlighten Jim — whether Jim wanted to be enlightened or not — right on schedule. "Anecdotally enhances sexual performance."

It was somehow sad not to be surprised by that. Still, you lived with Sandburg, you learned to expect this kind of thing. Jim shook his head. "Your dates all chip together for this?"

Blair's eyes were back on his book. Of course. "Scoff all you want, my friend, but fine-tuning a precision instrument can't hurt. In my case. In your case, of course, we'd be looking at emergency restorative measures. Yohimbe bark, maybe. Or mamajuana."

Mamajuana? Jim tossed Blair's 'fine-tuning' bee pollen back in the freezer and pulled out the coffee beans. He kept his mouth firmly shut, ignoring the crack about restorative measures. Time to drop the subject; he'd known for a while now what he needed to spark his love life, and he had no desire to discuss it with Blair. It sure as hell wasn't yohimbe bark or whatever unlikely and possibly illegal substance mamajuana was; it wasn't anything that could be stored in a Ziploc bag inside his freezer at all.

 

============

 

"Smooth, Chief," Jim said without sympathy, as he watched the admittedly attractive backside of the new clerk in Records disappear down the hallway, its owner apparently immune to Sandburg's best efforts at ingratiation. "Looks like you've got her eating out of the palm of your hand."

Blair's expression, which had been a relatively equal blend of disappointment and disgruntlement, changed to unadulterated annoyance as he gave up on his most recent attempt at a conquest. "Just leave it alone, Jim," he said.

Jim couldn't blame him for the attitude. He'd just gotten shot down pretty spectacularly, and he'd been on a losing streak for days now; the pressure had to be getting to him. In more ways than one, by this point.

It certainly showed in the scowl on his face, which was just daring Jim to make his day. Hard to resist a challenge like that, even if Jim's better nature had been kicking in. Which it wasn't. Jim made sure he had a nice clear path to the elevators before he moved a step closer to Blair, bent down toward Blair's ear, and murmured "Bzzz", just loud enough for Blair to hear. Perfect timing: before Blair could reel off a bitter retort or deal out a not so friendly punch to the biceps — the punches had stopped being entirely friendly somewhere around the third time Jim had 'bzzz'ed at him this week — Jim called out "Hold the door" to one of the uniforms who was just stepping into an elevator, and headed towards that well-timed elevator at a jog.

Behind him, he could hear a not very muted "Aughhh" and what sounded like Sandburg slapping his hands onto his head and running his fingers through his hair. When Jim got onto the elevator and turned around, smirking, Blair was still tugging at his hair. The glare he aimed at Jim as the elevator doors started to close was blistering, and Jim's smirk broadened.  
  
A well thought out campaign could be a thing of beauty; Jim was no stranger to that fact. But even a half-assed campaign concocted a couple of mornings ago in fifteen seconds flat while grinding coffee beans and brooding about the contents of a Ziploc bag, Sandburg, and something called 'mamajuana' was turning out to have its moments.

 

============

 

"No truck, he's not home. You're not home, Jim, right?" Sandburg's voice as he entered the loft didn't exactly sound distressed, but it did sound…stressed. And hopeful that Jim wasn't home. That was interesting — as long as it wasn't anything _too_ interesting.

Jim walked out from the end of the bathroom hallway with all his senses focused on Blair, who was standing in the doorway of the loft and peering up at Jim's bedroom with a wary expression. "Nope," Jim said easily, enjoying Blair's startled jump, "I'm not home. Why is it that you don't want me to be home, Chief?"

"Shit," Blair muttered He took in a couple of deep breaths of air surreptitiously, like he was trying to calm himself without Jim knowing he needed to. It was a useless tactic since his pulse was thundering along and his face was flushed — and that couldn't be sunburn; he and his flavor of the hour hadn't been out on their picnic long enough for Sandburg to get sunburned. Embarrassment?

Jim raised his eyebrows and waited. He was rewarded with several visual clues as Blair turned to close the door he'd left open. "Hey, Jim. No reason. I just didn't see your truck," he said, taking his time setting the chain and fiddling with the other locks. It was one of his more half-hearted efforts at avoidance, and one which didn't have a prayer of working, considering the colorful condition of the back of his shirt and the way he'd been moving as he turned, and…

"Parked on Shipwright," Jim answered absently, trying to put his finger on what was wrong with — "What the hell happened to your butt?"

"This is karma, right?" Blair appeared to be asking his question of the ceiling, so Jim didn't answer. He just kept staring at Blair's newly lop-sided ass. There was no denying — at least not to Jim's zoomed-in vision — that the left half of the seat of Blair's jeans was now filled out a little more fully than the right half, swelling out just above the bottom curve of Blair's otherwise normally shaped rear end.

Blair cut off Jim's view by turning back around. He was still addressing the ceiling. "It has to be karma, for when I was eight and Naomi's friend Rachel made me wear a bumblebee costume for Halloween because she thought it was adorable" — his hands surrounded the word with disgusted air quotes — "and I had to defend my apian honor against so many Darth Vaders and Wookiees that I ended up pulling out the pillows she'd stuffed the stupid costume with and hiding them behind somebody's garage, then ripping off the antennae and wings and telling everybody I was a Zoomorph from the really cool planet Zoon, not a stupid bumblebee." He paused, presumably to breathe, and dropped his affronted gaze from the ceiling. Which brought it back to Jim's neighborhood, and the _Oh, shit_ face he made as his eyes landed on Jim — apparently he'd temporarily forgotten Jim was there — was highly entertaining. For Jim, anyway.

_Bumblebee Blair?_ 'Oh, shit' was right. But Jim decided on an oblique approach for the moment. "A Zoomorph from the planet Zoon? And they bought that?" He had to admit it did sound vaguely plausible, and even at the tender age of eight Blair had probably excelled at selling a load of shit convincingly. However, there was a more pressing issue. Blair kept a box of photos in his dresser drawer; would Naomi or Naomi's friend Rachel have taken a photo of the 'adorable' bumblebee? Would Blair have kept a copy if they had?

"The really _cool_ planet Zoon, Jim." Blair sighed. He sounded resigned to his fate at Jim's hands, although that wasn't a state of mind that was likely to last very long. "It wasn't like any of the Star Wars groupies were smart enough to know what zoon means or what a zoomorph really is." Fuck. Jim temporarily shelved his hopeful thoughts about photographic evidence and racked his brain. Zoomorph sounded like…biology, maybe? Zoon just sounded like Blair must've made it up. But for the first time in living memory when Jim wouldn't have minded suffering through an automatic explanation, Blair skipped providing one. "And it was such a nowheresville little town that movies were always late getting to them and they knew I'd been living near L.A. for a while before we moved there, so they were kind of afraid they'd look like losers if they didn't believe me about _The Twelve Moons of the Planet Zoon_ , opening soon at a theater near them. Or more to the point, opening eventually at their podunk local theater, having already opened to waves of hysterical adoration at cooler movie theaters everywhere else across America."

Hysterical would just about describe Sandburg's reaction if Jim could get his hands on a photo of this. Maybe he could track Naomi down and ask her for one if a raid on Blair's room didn't turn up the goods? Unethical, sure, but in this case the end would definitely justify the means; a photo like that would be worth Bumblebee Blair's weight in gold for blackmail purposes.

"So we had this kind of uneasy truce — I kept making up more stuff about Zoomorphs and Zoon, and they kept watching for _The Twelve Moons of the Planet Zoon_ to show up in the Coming Soon trailers at the movie theater and getting more and more suspicious every week. I was really glad when Naomi and Rachel had some kind of disagreement a couple of weeks before Christmas and Naomi woke me up in the middle of the night so we could catch the next Greyhound out of town."

It took a moment for Jim to realize Blair had stopped talking. He was still standing by the door, but now he looked peeved. A peeved ex-Zoomorph.

And ex- _bee_. Christmas really could come in July. Jim cleared his throat. "Bumblebee, huh?"

"Don't start, Jim. Just don't."

"Wouldn't dream of it, Chief." Which neither of them believed, Jim was pretty sure. But he had more immediate fish to fry right now than Blair's checkered past. He aimed one of the more effective expressions he used in interrogations — effective with normal people, at any rate — at Blair. "You going to tell me what happened?"

Blair just scowled.

"Guess not. Let's see… Considering the theme of your little trip down memory lane, I'm assuming the yellow streaks on the back of your shirt are pollen, the green streaks are grass stains, and the lump on your butt came from rolling around on top of a bee? I hope your date enjoyed herself more than you did."

Blair's scowl intensified. "All right, yes, I ended up on a bee. Are you happy now?" Jim managed not to answer that affirmatively, at least not out loud, but he couldn't keep himself from grinning. Wrong thing to do; Blair had left peeved in the rearview mirror and was speeding straight toward pissed off, judging by the sound of his voice as he went on, "You wouldn't be laughing if it was you standing here with a bee stinger stuck in your butt, so shut the hell up already."

That was supposed to be a reason for Jim not to laugh? "Don't even try to tell me that if I was standing here with a bee stinger in my butt — which I wouldn't be, since I have enough sense to look for bees before I plant my behind on a patch of grass — _you_ wouldn't be laughing," Jim protested. He made an effort to collect himself, though; after all, Blair had to be in a fair amount of pain here. Shit, the stinger — "The stinger's still in there? Why the hell didn't you get it out right away? You'd be in better shape right now if you'd gotten your date to pull it out for you as soon as you got stung."

"I know that, Jim." Blair could pack an impressive amount of sarcasm into his voice when he wanted to. "Lisa would've helped, but the restroom at the park was closed — apparently they'd just discovered the building was infested with hornets; you have to admire the synchronicity there — and there isn't anything else anywhere near that park, so I had to drive _somewhere_ , and I figured it might as well be here. And before you suggest I should've put some ice on it, I was _not_ going to walk around holding a paper towel full of melting ice against my butt and ending up with the seat of my jeans sopping wet on the sunniest day Cascade has seen in the past twenty years. Widespread public humiliation wasn't exactly on my list of goals for this afternoon."

Private humiliation seemed to be doing pretty well, though. Jim was glad to help it along, but it wasn't like Sandburg not to explore all the options, or to invent some new ones. He said, "I'm kind of surprised you didn't just find a private corner in the park and take care of it then and there, Chief. You must've been somewhere pretty private or you wouldn't have been doing all that rolling around in the first place."

Blair sighed, looking like he was winding down a little. "Yeah, well, we would have gone off somewhere, except when the bee got me I yelled and it was like my fifteen minutes of fame; no way could we sneak off and count on being private after I'd attracted that much attention. And getting arrested for indecent exposure — or somebody having a camera with them and capturing that moment on film for eternity — was a little more fun than I was in the mood for at that point."

It probably wasn't the right time for Jim to admit he'd have been willing to pay a bystander a substantial amount for a photo of those proceedings. He tried to force himself to look sympathetic, but judging by Blair's expression, he was missing the mark.

"Shut up, Jim."

Yeah, he'd missed the mark. So what; he was only human. However, he could at least _pretend_ a little sympathy. Or common sense. "Don't you think you should get that stinger out of your ass before it becomes a permanent part of the landscape? It's not going to pull itself out."

Blair grimaced. "I _know_ that, Jim."

 

============

 

Sandburg might have known it, but apparently Jim hadn't. And a well thought out campaign could be a thing of beauty, true enough, but Jim's half-assed mental midget of a campaign was suddenly showing its limitations. It didn't have a contingency plan in place to handle Jim finding himself standing behind Sandburg's naked butt with a pair of tweezers, for one thing.

For another thing, it had completely and shortsightedly skipped over the possibility that Blair — bending over, with his hands braced against the counter and his jeans and boxers tugged down around his knees — would be groaning as Jim stood behind his naked butt and carefully probed the red, swollen area where the broken-off stinger was embedded. That the groans Blair was making were due to pain and not pleasure registered in Jim's brain but nowhere lower than that — after all, it was hardly a serious injury. And Sandburg had incurred it while rolling around in a flower bed with his latest playmate, when he could've been rolling around enjoying himself with Jim, in perfect, insect-free safety, without ever bothering to leave the loft, if he'd ever shown any signs of being interested. Jim's dick didn't seem to think sympathy was required, under the circumstances.

Jim tried to will his unsympathetic dick into indifference. Or discretion, at least. It was probably a good moment to remind himself that this wasn't anything other than it was, especially since he had to take one of his hands off Blair's ass to adjust himself as his dick's interest level went up another couple of notches. He cleared his throat. "You really figured on managing this yourself with a mirror?"

"Hey, I do yoga."

"You do? Since when?" It wasn't that Jim monitored Blair's every movement in the loft, not even close, but he didn't think Blair sitting cross-legged on the living room floor really counted as yoga, and if pretzel-like contortions were being performed in secret behind Blair's closed French doors, Jim wanted to know about it. It was his loft, after all. He should be entitled to a front-row seat.

"Okay, not for a couple of years, but it's like riding a bicycle, right? I've still got the moves."

Jim stepped back. "Could be interesting to watch you try."

"Just pull the stinger _out_ already, for God's sake. I'm in pain here."

"I don't think it's going to make that much difference at this point, pal. It's been in there long enough to pump out all the venom it had in it and then some; you're going to be in pain no matter what. And when it stops hurting like a sonofabitch, it'll probably start itching like crazy."

"That's great, Jim. Thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't realized that." It sounded like Blair had his teeth gritted together as much from sarcasm as from pain. "You're enjoying this entirely too much, you know that."

Jim answered without thinking, his eyes still on the prize that wasn't his to claim. "Chief, if I wanted you bent over the counter mooning me and moaning, Neosporin and tweezers wouldn't be part of the picture."

There was an almost tangible silence from Sandburg, long enough for Jim's words to sink into his consciousness and from there take the express elevator down to the bottom of Jim's stomach. _Shit._

"I didn't know there _was_ a picture," Blair said, finally. He sounded prosaic, like he was talking about whether it was Jim's turn or his to make dinner.

Thank God.

Jim let the tone of his voice match Blair's exactly. "Lot of things you don't know, Sandburg. Including how to make out with your date in a park without going on the DL."

"Who says I'm disabled?" Blair demanded. "I'm not out of action here, not from a stupid _bee_ , I'm just —" His protest was cut off with a yelp as he straightened up to be indignant more effectively. Jim could've told him that it was difficult to pull off indignation successfully when your ass was sporting a large, ugly, swollen, red lump and your Donald Duck boxers were scrunched down around your knees, but why bother? Blair would find that out for himself soon enough.

"Ow," Blair said again, this time sullenly, as he subsided back to his previous position and thrust his ass imperatively toward Jim — and there wasn't any fucking contingency plan in place for _that_ , either. "Stop screwing around and just get it _out_ , okay?"

Jim ground his teeth together and sent a few more silent, stern orders to his dick. But after he 'got it out', providing he and his dick both survived the rest of this experience, he was taking his pathetic, incompetent turkey of a campaign outside and shooting it. Repeatedly.

 

============

 

"But I want to watch _Six Weeks in Sumba_ ," Blair had said. Whined, actually. So he was lying on his stomach on the couch instead of on his futon, with the TV tuned to some tribal documentary and an ice pack on his boxers-clad butt. The ice pack was ringed with rolled up towels in an effort to keep the couch dry as the ice melted, but Jim wasn't all that hopeful. At least it was just water and therefore a lot more innocuous than some of the other fluids Jim knew that Blair had gotten on the couch during his tenure in the loft, without any remorse that Jim had ever been able to detect.

Jim sighed as he walked past the back of the couch, eyeing the platoon of Donald Ducks leering at him from Blair's upper thighs and the half of Blair's butt that wasn't covered by the ice pack and towels. What the hell kind of boxers were those to wear on a date, anyway? Unless Sandburg hadn't had any hope of her getting into his pants or of her getting into his, and knowing Sandburg, even if he hadn't had any hope he _still_ would've been hoping.  
  
_Hold on a minute._ He knew he'd been forgetting something. Jim paused as he reached the end of the couch. "What happened to whatever her name was? You couldn't talk her into a little first aid at her place, some TLC? Golden opportunity there, Romeo. You losing your touch?"

Blair had his head propped up on one hand, wincing a little as he watched riders on horseback throwing spears at each other in what looked like some form of particularly bloody ritual combat. He closed his eyes and dropped his hand, letting his head fall forward to mash down into the cushion. "We were going to go back to her apartment, but she ran into her ex-boyfriend on our way out of the park and they started talking, and she ended up taking him home instead, along with the picnic hamper and the thirty bucks' worth of lunch I bought that we hadn't eaten yet," he said after a moment, in a muffled and nearly indecipherable stream of rapid syllables.

_Ouch._ Jim couldn't muster much sympathy about the ex-boyfriend, but the hamper was another story. That was adding insult to injury. "At this rate, Chief, you're not going to get a chance to find out if that bee pollen crap really works." Not that he really wanted Blair to find out.

"Tell me about it," Blair moaned, into the cushion. "Karma. Really bad bee karma. It has to be."

In the bizarre universe Sandburg inhabited that might even be possible; if so, Jim couldn't blame the bee world for trying to get a little of its own back. "You could be right, Bumblebee Boy," he said, eliciting a groan from Blair and sitting down on the arm of the couch next to Blair's feet in order to contemplate the back of Blair's head.

And those Donald Duck boxers. Christ. It wasn't so much that Sandburg _had_ Donald Duck boxers — Jim had let Blair get away with throwing his laundry into Jim's laundry basket often enough to know that his roommate also concealed Rocky and Bullwinkle and Curious George beneath his jeans from time to time, so the ducks weren't really a surprise even if Jim hadn't encountered them before. But wearing them on a date, for Pete's sake? About as smooth as sandpaper.

On the other hand, Blair being about as smooth as sandpaper was…comforting. None of his string of conquests ever lasted past a few dates — maybe not even past the first view of Blair's cartoon underwear; Jim was always careful to not pay enough attention to track exactly who'd been doing what to whom whenever Blair came home from a date — and Jim couldn't argue with results like that. Not one fucking bit. Hell, maybe he'd hit Wal-Mart up for some Mighty Mouses or Road Runners and slip them in with the rest of the Saturday morning crew in Blair's dresser, just in case it might improve the odds for Blair's future dates to end prematurely.

The ducks were getting a little soggy around the towel fence, molding the fabric more closely to the curves of Blair's ass, and Jim sighed silently. Life wasn't going to be any easier now that Blair's bare ass had thrust itself into his memories. Far too tempting to mentally tug those damp ducks back down off Blair's butt, to imagine Blair making those groans again, this time from pleasure, as he bent over the counter and —

"Jim, I have to know."

Jim unwillingly pulled his thoughts away from his fantasy. Blair hadn't removed his face from the cushion yet and his voice was still muffled as he continued. "There's a picture? You have a picture?"

The words didn't register at first, even though Jim had just been thinking about that picture — thinking very specifically about that picture — and when they dropped into place with a solid, dick-jarring thud he felt himself flush. This wasn't a conversation they were supposed to be having. This wasn't anything Blair was supposed to be asking about — he wasn't interested in Jim. That had been clear for a long time now, and Jim could think of far better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon than having that lack of interest rubbed in his face.

Blair propped himself back up on his elbow and twisted his head backwards to peer at Jim. Oddly enough, he looked nervous. He also looked the way Chinese water torture might look if it were human, and getting ready to start dripping.

"Jim," Blair said again. "You said you have a picture."

Quite a few pictures. A fucking photo album of pictures. But Blair didn't need to know that. He didn't have any _right_ to know that. "I say a lot of stuff, Chief," Jim answered. "Some of it I even mean."

Blair made a face that looked on the surface like simple exasperation, but somehow Jim had the feeling he'd let him down. Which didn't make much sense. "Don't you?" he asked Blair after a moment, fishing.

"I asked you first."

Maybe there was nervousness in that and maybe there was exasperation, but there was also undeniable challenge. And blame the Army, blame his college football coach — hell, blame his father — Jim felt himself responding regardless of his better judgment; he'd been too thoroughly indoctrinated by experts to be able to let a challenge pass by unmet. "Yeah," he said, "you did, didn't you. And yeah, I do."

Sometimes, of course, it was better to meet a challenge with something other than the truth. Everybody but his college football coach had drilled _that_ into him, too. Blair was staring at him, his mouth dropped open a little, looking like that was the last thing he'd expected Jim to say.

Fuck.

"Okay." At least Blair closed his mouth after he said that, even if the startled expression stayed in place.

But 'okay' what? Jim wasn't sure he wanted to know. He _was_ sure that Blair wasn't going to leave it there, whatever he meant by that 'okay' — which most likely was that he was live and let live enough, or lazy enough, to not move out of the loft in an attempt to spare Jim's feelings. That kind of 'okay' Jim could handle.

"I think we should do it."

"You think we should…" Part company over Jim's unrequited horniness? This _definitely_ wasn't a conversation Jim wanted to have. Blair didn't mean he intended to move out, for Christ's sake, did he? He didn't even pay rent, at least not much, and not consistently; where the hell else was he going to find a deal like the one Jim gave him? But much as Jim didn't want to know, postponing this now wasn't going to help any. He said, keeping his voice neutral, "Chief, what are you talking about?"

Blair's expression this time was pure, undiluted exasperation. "Man, you have a short attention span. Your picture, Jim. Remember?"

Okay, so Blair wasn't thinking about moving out. But still, this was going nowhere. 'Do it'? Jim closed his eyes and massaged his forehead. "You're not interested in —"

"I'm not… _That's_ what you think?"

"That's what I _know_ , Sandburg. We live together. You think I don't know you inside and out?"

"Jim. We're doing it. You only think you know me; trust me." Blair's voice was determined, and what Jim trusted was that he wasn't going to let up on this, not if he wanted it. And it seemed like now, out of the blue, he did. _Why_ he wanted it, Jim didn't know.

He stopped rubbing his forehead and pinned Blair with a stare. "Curiosity, Chief?"

Blair's eyes narrowed. He had to be getting a crick in his neck by this point, but he was still looking over his shoulder at Jim. "Sure. The way things are going, how else am I going to know if my bee pollen works?"

His expression — stubborn, ticked off, almost defiant — was one Jim had seen often enough when Blair was fighting for something he believed in. And Jim would be the first to point out that Blair believed in curiosity, believed in it with an irritating amount of passion…but curiosity generally only made Blair annoyingly creative along with being annoyingly stubborn, it didn't make him angry. It didn't make him look the way he looked right now; ticked off, defiant, determined, and…

Vulnerable. _Shit._ Like Jim.

Jim let his hand move over to rest on Blair's ankle, not in a casual pat, but something else entirely, his fingers exploring the smoothly defined hollows, the sharp line of tendon, the solid, unyielding bone. "You could have a point there," he said, as the pulse beneath his fingers began to speed up. It was a start, but not much of one; he wanted to slide his hand up the swell of Blair's calf, up the strong muscles of his thigh, slip his fingers underneath those ludicrous grinning ducks and give them something to really grin about.

Whatever this ended up being, he couldn't refuse it. He wouldn't refuse it even if he had the strength to ignore that expression on Blair's face, to match Blair's determined _yes_ with an equally determined _no_. Which he didn't.

But that was all right — it had to be all right — since he didn't want to say _no_.

"You have any apian honor left to defend, now's the time," he said, feeling himself start to smile, and allowing his hand to ease itself up a few inches onto more new territory. So much to explore. He'd always been good at recon missions.

Blair was still staring over his shoulder at Jim, his eyes now midnight-dark, the pupils nearly eclipsing the iris. Jim liked that look on Blair, when it was meant for him, anyway. He also liked the huskiness of Blair's voice when he spoke, even if Blair wasn't answering what Jim had just said, even if he was answering what Jim _hadn't_ said instead, what Jim wasn't sure he'd wanted to have answered in the first place.

"I didn't know, Jim. I mean, you and everybody you've dated, and you've never once — I was sure you didn't…" He swallowed visibly, which looked a little painful with his neck twisted around the way it currently was. "You really thought I wasn't… Okay, I was trying to keep it out of your face, yeah, but I'm not a miracle worker, there had to be clues you could've picked up a million times — like every time you've walked around here practically in the buff, and I mean seriously _buff_ , not to mention —"

"You really want to dissect this right now?" Jim let his fingers move a few inches further up; they'd made it halfway up Blair's calf, and he trailed his thumbnail lightly against the muscle.

That shiver looked nice on Blair, too.

Blair shook his head silently, which was something of a miracle in itself, and Jim felt a shiver run through his own body, a current of anticipation that should've felt familiar, but felt brand-new. "You know what I think?" he said, watching Blair watch him with those dark, hungry eyes. "I think your bee karma is about to change. For good."

Or for now, at least. But wherever this ended up, whatever it ended up being, it was already more than he'd ever thought he'd have from Blair. And most of the best things in Jim's life had started out as a total crap-shoot, Blair included: Blair as rescuer, roommate, friend, partner —

Bumblebee. He smiled again. Sandburg was going to regret sharing that, especially if Jim could track down a photo or two.

But that was for later — right now, he had a bunch of ducks to deal with. And a still silent, impossibly silent, hungry-eyed Blair, shivering a little underneath his hand. And he wasn't even really doing anything yet.

Maybe his own karma was about to change.

Maybe for good.  
   
 


End file.
